What Is a Mosque? A Direction, a Space and Not Much Else Required

A handful of features recur worldwide and each has a function rather than a symbolic requirement:

• •The qibla wall, which faces Mecca and is the one element that genuinely determines the building's orientation and therefore its plan
• •The mihrab, a niche in that wall marking the direction, which does nothing structurally and everything for legibility, and which is usually the most decorated element in the building
• •The minbar, a stepped pulpit from which the sermon is delivered at the Friday prayer
• •A large open prayer hall with rows rather than seating, since worshippers stand shoulder to shoulder in lines parallel to the qibla wall, which means the useful dimension is width rather than depth and explains why mosque halls are broad rather than long
• •A facility for ritual washing before prayer, traditionally a fountain in a courtyard
• •A minaret, from which the call to prayer is given, which is a later addition and is absent from many early and many modern mosques
• •No images of living beings, and no furniture, which is why the decoration is geometric, floral and calligraphic and why the floor is the significant surface

The first mosque was the Prophet's house in Medina: a walled courtyard with a shaded area of palm trunks and fronds along one side, which established the hypostyle plan of a flat roof on many columns that dominated early Islamic architecture. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, completed in 715, incorporated an existing Roman temple precinct and Christian basilica and set a monumental standard. The Great Mosque of Cordoba took the hypostyle form to an extreme with hundreds of columns and distinctive double-tier horseshoe arches. Ottoman architecture, above all the work of the sixteenth-century architect Sinan, took the domed space of Byzantine churches including Hagia Sophia and developed it into vast unobstructed interiors under a central dome with cascading half-domes, which is the image most non-Muslims have of a mosque. Persian and Central Asian traditions produced the four-iwan plan with great vaulted portals on each side of a courtyard, covered in tilework. Mughal India combined Persian planning with local materials, and West African mosques including the enormous Great Mosque of Djenne are built of mud brick with projecting wooden beams that serve as permanent scaffolding for the annual replastering, which is done by the whole town in a single day.

The building's function is wider than the five daily prayers. The Friday midday prayer is congregational and obligatory for men, with a sermon, which is why a mosque holding that service is distinguished in some traditions as a congregational mosque. Beyond prayer, mosques have historically served as schools, courts, libraries, treasuries, hostels and places to settle disputes, and the great mosque of a city was its civic centre. A madrasa for teaching is frequently attached, and several of the oldest continuously operating universities in the world grew from mosque complexes, including al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri and recognised by Unesco as the oldest degree-granting institution still functioning. The mosque also handles the collection and distribution of alms and the organisation of funerals. Arrangements for women vary enormously between traditions and regions, from separate galleries or rooms to shared space with a screen to, in some communities, no provision at all, which is a live argument within Muslim communities rather than a settled matter of law.

Two features carry meaning that a visitor may miss. The call to prayer is given five times a day in a set text, sung rather than spoken, and the minaret exists to project it; amplification has largely replaced climbing the tower, and regulation of the volume and timing is a recurring point of local dispute in countries where the majority is not Muslim and, for different reasons, in some where it is. Calligraphy is the principal decorative art, and the texts are not ornamental: inscriptions around a dome or across a mihrab are Quranic verses selected for the setting, so that the decoration is the scripture and reading the building is possible for anyone literate in the script. The absence of figural imagery in religious settings is a matter of practice and interpretation rather than explicit Quranic prohibition, deriving from prophetic tradition and from a concern with idolatry, and it applies far less strictly in secular Islamic art, which contains a great deal of figurative painting.

The requirements for Islamic prayer are a clean space and the correct orientation, so a mosque's plan is determined by the wall facing Mecca, marked by a niche, and by the need for broad rows of standing worshippers rather than seating. Minarets, domes and courtyards developed later and regionally, producing hypostyle halls in Cordoba, cascading domes in Ottoman Turkey, tiled four-iwan courtyards in Persia and mud brick with permanent scaffolding in West Africa. Mosques have served as schools, courts and libraries, and the calligraphic decoration consists of scripture chosen for the location.